Personal Update

You know why most people stay in the same place and keep friends they've had from High School their entire life? Because it is stupidly hard to make friends as an adult. Making friends seems to be primarily about playing together. In school you have time to play and you have people your same age with the same schedule as you who you can make time to play with. Making friends then is as simple as saying - wanna come play at my house? As an adult I keep inviting potential friends over to play and we keep running into scheduling conflicts. It sucks.

I am determined to succeed. I keep inviting and keep rearranging schedules. I think I am on the brink of having a regular roleplaying group on Friday nights. *fingers crossed* Something has gotta give. It has never taken me this long to make social connections anywhere else I've lived.

I am in self-improvement life-changing mode lately. There are a variety of things I am actively working on fixing.

Writing for example. I've been whining that I want to write, but not actually doing it. There aren't any good excuses - I mean yes, I've been busy, but when is that going to end? So I've written it into my weekly work schedule and so far (2 weeks) I'm keeping it up. I've got a nonfiction book proposal germinating, I'm trying to hold up my end on a collaborative gaming project with Doug, and I am going to blog more. Like I'm doing now.

As an addendum to the writing more thing, I'm also reading more. Can't really be good at one without the other.

Another thing that has to change is my eating habits. For one thing I just want to be a bit healthier. I want to have energy to do things like play tennis or go hiking with my Youth Group. For another thing I have long felt that there were some serious ethical issues with the way we eat in this country. Just watched Food Inc last night and had my convictions deepened. I'm living in a major hub of corporate agriculture, I may even do some educating in my congregation about our food system and how, well, bad it is.

Obviously, since I'm listing all this stuff I'm adding, I also have to give stuff up. In truth I'm giving up some time-wasting. I am surfing random sites less, reading fewer blogs, waking up earlier and stuff like that. My biggest chunk of time is less WoW. I was playing it quite a lot out of boredom. I've cut back to basically raid nights and another hour for some daily quests to get the gold I need to raid. On the work front I've just gotten more efficient at some aspects of my job giving me more time to do things like write.

If this all sounds overly optimistic - worry not, I will probably fail at several of these self-improvement projects. Most of these have been ongoing for the last several years. I've made progress in fits and starts and then fallen back and then picked it up again. Part of saying it publicly like this is to shame myself into sticking with it.